Category: modernism
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tina modotti + me
Photo at lower right is of Tina Modotti, by Edward Weston. In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is:…
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(post)colonial imaginaries: arabesques #2
These images are all from the exhibition “Présences arabes – Art moderne et décolonisation. Paris 1908-1988,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris from April to August 2024. La Musée d’Art Moderne propose de redécouvrir la diversité des modernités arabes au 20ème siècle et de renouveler le regard historique sur des scènes artistiques encore peu…
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(post)colonial imaginaries: arabesques #1
Images from exhibition “Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles” (Whitechapel Gallery, London, Feb–May 2024) Originally conceived for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Dreams Have No Titles is an immersive installation comprising film, sculpture, photography and performance, that interweaves the artist’s biography with activist films produced across France, Algeria and Italy in the…
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unexpected encounters #14: alt.modern
The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again. We returned to our homes broken, limbs…
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unexpected encounters #12: road trip journal
The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel … always on alert. I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax … Edith Farnsworth, quoted on panel at Farnsworth House [Sally] Hemings’…
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unexpected encounters #11: in the zone
War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body … War is beautiful because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages.…
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unexpected encounters #10: the arrival of modernity
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. Karl Marx, Capital,…
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unexpected encounters #8: phantasmagorias
The world dominated by its phantasmagorias—this, to make use of Baudelaire’s term, is “modernity.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds…
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redder yet
1-2 Tokyo, September 2011 #3 Calgary #4-6 Mexico City, February 2018 #1-2 Mexico City, February 2018 #3 New York City, January 2011 #4 + 6 Johor Bahru, February 2023 #5 Singapore, February 2023 #1 Siem Reap, February 2016 #2-6 Mexico City February 2018 all remaining images Mexico City, February 2018
Camera lucida 